Memecoins Are Stress-Testing The Future Of Tokenized Stocks

Transcript

Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. All right, everyone. Welcome back to Empire back Santi me. No, Rob as it should be. Get out of here, Rob. [laughter] >> Which means, ladies and gentlemen, is we're not going to talk about regulation. We're not going to talk about poly market and we're not going to talk about the dragonfly portfolio. >> I saw Rob was uh I was supposed to speak at that stable con event with uh Rob. Couldn't make it, but Rob was looking dapper. I saw a picture of him. So, >> no doubt. No doubt.

>> Santi, how's New York? >> What are you doing in town? >> It's great. >> It's electric. I'm here with the team. It's the best time to be in New York. The US Open's going on. Fashion week's going on. Neither part of neither, but it's a [laughter] great time to be back. Great part. Great time to be back in the city. Uh, a lot to talk about, man. What's What's going on in your world? >> Uh, who'd you see at the US Open? I saw Koko beat uh what's her name? A Asinova or something. >> You didn't stay until 3 3:30 in the morning to see uh Alcrath.

>> No, no, no. So, my flight got cancelceled twice, so I couldn't make it in time. And uh I I I landed. I was very jetlagged. Incredible match. Did you see it? >> Uh no, cuz it was, you know, started at 11:00 p.m. and went till 3:00 a.m. I don't know what the US Open's doing this year. It makes no sense, but I did. But you should watch. There's these extended highlights. If you go on YouTube and watch the like type in extended highlights Alcarez, you know, Shelton, it is the most athletic game of tennis I think I've ever seen in my life. It is unbelievable match. >> Yeah. I mean, we're not going to talk about the US Open, but two things that that are pretty impressive, like the age of these athletes, like they're 19, they're 18, like and and the athleticism >> and the amount of Americans that have

gone far on both men and women. But, uh, yeah, some pretty pretty pretty good stuff. Good to see it. >> Um, okay. You don't want to talk about the open. What do you want to talk about? Tokenized stocks. Robin Hood. >> Been in the trenches. >> Been in the trenches. Okay. So, you guys Okay. So, I missed last week. I didn't And I didn't listen. So, I don't know what you guys actually talked about, but I hopefully you guys were talking about Robin Hood. >> So, the Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm back in the trenches. You know, >> are you are you on So, you're on FOMO. >> I I downloaded FOMO uh like two weekends ago, and it was like an electric weekend because you had uh a huge run up. had meme, you had um you know the whole debate of like these public company CEOs

like really being vocal and critical about these memecoin paired with um you know tokenized stocks and then Vlad is getting involved and so I saw the runup of meme to what basically zero to 100 million um and then obviously Boner which is the memecoin tied to him really interesting phenomenon and then obviously the entire showdown now there there's a really interesting stuff happening in the trenches like we'll cover some of it here, but what things I find interesting the um sheer growth of Robin Hood um and what it's doing to its business and uh these meme coins paired to tokenized stocks uh and also Salana putting up a good fight now saying wait a minute not so fast we're not going to

we're not going to just sit idly you have to and Raj and Ston and Pump and these like uh chain wars are back meme coins are back it just feels like Salana whiff uh kind of moment, you know, it was like things are 2024. >> No, things are things feel extremely alive right now. Do you remember when the um this was I'm going to take this from Mike because Mike and I were catching up about like what is this moment in time that we're in. Do you and Mike this is Yeah, I'm going to steal this from Mike which he pointed out. He said, "Do you remember when the Cointelegraph intern, this is the last cycle, Cointelegraph intern tweeted out saying I I forget exactly what it was, but something about the Bitcoin ETFs and we had that 10% candle and everyone I

like it was just disbelief." I remember we recorded an episode right after that and people I think no one could believe that we could even see a 10% candle again. We were we had been in the bare market for so long that this idea of a 10% candle was crazy. And I think that's what the last couple of weeks have been. And do you remember what happened right after that? >> So we got memecoin started moving. >> Yeah. >> Memecoin memecoin started moving and me you know we had um you had farcoin and you had like you had all the and I you know I know farcoin came later but you had pepe you had every Yeah. You're right. You're right.

You're right. Pepe ran hard. Uh then you had the disbelief ran hard like there was disbelief on the timeline that we could be in a bull market. There was so much of like this was a you know short squeeze. We're going to go back. This this was all there so many reasons for why it could never be a bull market. And my take is this is what the very beginning of a bull market feels like. I I I think actually the last couple of months I tweeted out a couple months ago like 65k generational bottom that I had just started and I I don't get many of these calls right, but I think that was a good call. And uh that's what that's what I think we're in. We're in that we had the 10% disbelief candle. We're having a really fun run with memes. I'm

totally not involved because I'm way too busy with Block Works. But like for people who are involved, we I mean we had we had a guy at Blockworks made made three million bucks on on one of these. >> Average average crypto Joe or average Joe right? >> I don't I don't want to say who who's doing it, who did well, but you know, we had an analyst. We have a couple analysts who are just printing. >> There couple analysts. Block Works uh maybe she got to start a hes fund, but the Block Works analyst community has been uh >> do you know every every cycle people end up throwing I I know it's late cycle when people start LPs start throwing money at us saying go launch a fund. So we're not there yet but >> we're not there yet. There you go.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. I I had I had this idea of like you want to be buying when you want to puke and you want to sell when you start staking taking screenshots of your portfolio. I don't think we're and people ask me like where are we now? Doesn't feel like we're in either. I mean, I'm seeing a lot of screenshots from FOMO, which is interesting because like I think the FOMO guys, you had the episode, people should go listen to it. They built a they really nailed it across many things. I think they really finally got the social piece combined with a talk about like right time. Timing can be everything, but you have to back it up with like a great product. But the Robin Hood chain launch, the platform is super slick, cross mint, the ability to on-ramp super fast. You're in

the US and you use Apple Pay. Um the interesting stat obviously because we can talk about some of the kind of concerns that people might have is we should talk about like tokenized stocks because you know we were having a discussion in the last spot. Hey is this actually positive or negative? I was of the opinion it's super positive. No matter how you want to slice it >> tokenized stocks are positive or meme coins are positive. memecoin pairs back like this LP pools of tokenized stocks and and memecoins I think are going to be very they're going to be the mechan they're going to be the forcing function to get tokenized stocks market structure liquidity market makers and eventually markets moving more 247 365 this will serve as the catalyst it's

it's super inefficient now it's it there's obviously issues around But I've always felt memecoins really my point is memecoins >> really have stressed this the infrastructure more than any other piece of technology in crypto. Like look at what it did to Salana and for me it feels like tokenized stocks took a slow kind of have have not really taken off and this is the way they take off because they're going to discuss this a lot. >> Yeah. You know what? So, um, Coinbase is in a an interesting spot right here because I think I think the Hunter Biden laptop coin just launched on base, I'm pretty sure. And you've got, you know, Coinbase who wants to do things so like real world things, you

know, like bring creators on chain and it ends up just being like, >> you've just got this Hunter Biden thing. And then on the other side, you've got Robin Hood who actually leaned really heavily into memes at the launch of the chain. And now you've got they're leading for tokenized equities along with I think it's Robin Hood chain, Salana, and BNB. BNB is also doing BNB. >> Uh here's a stat for you. Number of stable coin holders. Do you know the chain that's had the most stable coin holders in the world? >> BNB. >> Tron historically. Tron. >> Oh, Tron. Yes. >> Tron BN BNB is about to for the first time in history pass Tron for number of stable coin holders. Go look at the Blockworks data. So, I think we should talk a little bit about this pairing of of equities and memecoins because I

think if you're not in the trenches, it's or you don't read block works, it's um yeah, >> you know, a little a little tough to pay, you know, pay attention to. So, do you want to give the overview of like >> Sure. >> uh Boner and Hymns. >> Yes. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because we covered a little bit in the prior episode, but I promise people that it wasn't enough coverage if we would go in a more deeper We have to, right? It's the most important narrative and it will likely be the most important narrative of this cycle. Basically, how it works is you have a you've had tokenized stocks for a long time. Um, there's different flavors of tokenized stocks.

Let's not get into that just yet. There's a lot of discussion online of how Robin Hood's doing it. Uh, how Backpack is doing it. And >> let's get there, but pun get there but pun. >> Let's get the pun. Tokenized stocks. Then in comes along memecoins. And the combination of the two is you have a memecoin like artificially new that um uh is uh you deposit that in an LP pool. So people should listen to like unis swap and defa you put that in an LP pool with a version of a tokenized stock in this case artificial news backed by Nvidia. Then you have bonercoin backed by him which is this company that does medication for erectile dysfunctions. So hence boner. Uh you have then meme um coin which is tied to AMC the cinema um

franchise. Um and so on and so forth. You have like memory moo which is uh you know backed by micron which is a memory company. Uh so you have many of these uh pools and what it does is and I'm going to get this part you know the rough sort of mechanism is you have a pool and so there is always some sort of imbalance like over the weekend there's only so much inventory in a place like Robin Hood that they have call it a hundred uh uh shares of a particular company but if you have so much demand which is happening here especially on the weekends you have so much new demand coming in from places like FOMO FOMO where you're buying more and more of the meme and so there's an imbalance between

the meme and the stock and so that creates a imbalance in the pool and for instance when Boner launched um there was so much influx of flows for that that the implied price of hymns over the weekend was three to four times the actual closing price of HIMS on Friday. Um, and so come Monday, of course, the authorized representatives I think that Robin Hood selects a couple of these call like u institutions that need to, you know, uh, do this, uh, have to refill, right, and go get more basically refill, get more versions of tokenized socks to to balance this thing out. Um, so that's the crude kind of explanation

of how this thing works. It's a it's an LP pool. um it doesn't confer a lot of people here's what I'll tell you maybe a lot of people you'll hear say it's backed so if you buy this memecoin it is backed by shares of whatever it is and that's not true right in no version of what is happening right now you have a claim on unwrapping or getting a a certain representation the only thing I would say is there that that started happening two weeks ago what is happening more recently is you've had this zai for instance which is um a memecoin of a a privacy anonymous cat I think it's called and what it is it's like it's a a pure meme coin it's like a

cat with a with a like a cardboard box or whatever sort of playing on privacy and it and you get um airdropped Zcash so it's a it's a flavor and a variation is pretty interesting actually it's basically like you're getting a dividend on the underlying Um, of course it's got a lot of popularity because Zcash has ran up quite a bit. We should talk about it as well. But I'll sort of pause there because that was the the other interesting primitive I tweeted when I saw it and I was in FOMO. I'm like I don't think I've seen and I saw the huge run up in DeFi summer is like I don't think I've seen an interesting of a

primitive >> since DeFi summer. >> Welcome to token 2049. Token 2049 is back October 7th and 8th, bringing together 25,000 attendees, 300 speakers, and 500 exhibitors for the world's largest crypto event. Token 2049 is happening alongside and in partnership with our own digital asset summit Asia, so you can experience both conferences in Singapore during the same week. across token 2049 week. There'll be more than 1,000 [music] side events culminating with after 2049 and formula 1 weekend and the speaker lineup is stacked. Shane Copan of Poly Market, Jeff Yan of Hyperlid, Arthur Hayes,

NASDAQ CEO Adena Freriedman, and many more. Join us in Singapore October 7th and 8th for Token 2049, and Digital Asset Summit Asia. Avalanche Summit is coming to New York City September 16th to 17th. Join the business and technology leaders building the next generation of financial products, enterprise systems, and consumer applications on chain. Learn how blockchain is enabling faster settlement, more efficient markets, and new business models [music] at AvalancheSummit NYC. Register for Avalanche Summit and use promo code blockworks15.

And ahead of the summit, you can track Avalanche tokenized equities alongside tokenized treasuries and their [music] growing footprint on Avalanche. See the data for yourself with Blockworks Research's [music] Avalanche dashboard. And don't forget to join us in New York City for Avalanche Summit. Yeah, I I agree. Okay, let me try to go a little deeper and I'm going to pull a lot of this from just block work. So, I'm going to read some of this. So two assets you have him you have uh HIMS and then you have which is a a stock that trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

Then you have Boner which is a meme coco that was launched August 20th. So what they did is they tokenized him. So tokenized HIMS is Robin a Robin Hood stock token on the Robin Hood chain. One token is supposed to track one HIMS share right but it's and you were I think alluding to this. It's not actually one. It's a it's a Jersey debt security that is backed in theory as my understanding one to one by real shares at a custodian. It's not actually they're not taking nyms and putting it into a vehicle. So you have no votes, no shareholder rights, you know, tiny float compared to the real company. Then you have Boner this memecoin which is mainly this joke. So what they what people did is they took a I think it's a unis swap I think it's a uni a uni amm like v3 v4

pool or something like that. You've got, you know, boner and hymns tokens. And these are the sep these are the separate markets. So when you buy boner with hymns, you send I think I'll get this correct. You send HIMS into the boner hims pool. The pool sends you boner pool. The pool the pool hims reserve goes up because you just put him in there. The pool boner reserve goes down. So then boner becomes more expensive priced in HIMS. I think I got that correct. So, uh, this does not in and of itself, I believe, make tokenized HIMS worth $130. It's locking, which I think it went to like 132 or something. It's

locking HIMS inside of the meme pool. So, those tokens are no longer sitting in the HIMS the other pool, which is HIMS USDC or I think it's actually HIMS USDG. >> Yeah. >> Where where the price discovery happens. So the the reason that pumps it is um >> the tokenized hymn supply is is only created by these authorized participants and it's only set in this set window which is um I think it's like Monday through Saturday or something maybe it's actually Monday through Friday I'm not sure. So on on a Saturday Sunday >> uh nobody can mint these new rappers so the onchain float is fixed. So you you essentially had a squeeze, right? You had I think I think there's like 60,000

HIMS tokens in existence. Over half of them were sitting in the boner hims pool. So you essentially took half the supply off the market and >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Anyways, I think that's I think that's the sequence for the weekend. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh you're not creating a short squeeze as Allah. >> Sorry, it's not a short squeeze. you're taking. >> No, no, it's a it's a it's a short squeeze on the pool of the authorized representative that it has, which is a very very small fraction of the total float of the stock.

>> You essentially took so much of the free float and put it into the meme pool um that the price of him, excuse me, the price of boner in him or maybe I'm getting that flipped went to 132 bucks. >> Yeah, that's right. But of course, uh what's interesting is >> him priced in boners. Yeah, there you go. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's the what was interesting is seeing the the CEOs of these public companies go out and saying, "Wait a minute." One of them had a really good quote. He said, "I woke up a loser." Meaning he saw like there there's all this demand for this meme coin, but it's not necessarily like doing that much for one, he didn't participate in the, you know, $und00 million, you know, out of thin air value creation, if you will. Um, but the the

the question that I pose and what could be interesting is are there going to be instances like imagine in a believe in something kind of thing if there's some of these meme coins like Pepe and she Shiva Inu and what have you ran up to like 17 billion 20 billion. So, what happens in a world where imagine if like 100x more demand for these meme coins that are in these pools goes up? Like what does that do to Robin Hood? What does that do to market infrastructure? And what does that ultimately do to you just have these LP pools and authorized participants basically start buying? What effectively

ends up happening? the downstream effect of all this is Robin Hood needs to go and find and source and have in their inventory more and more shares of whatever these meme coins are paired against whether it's GoPro or SanDisk or Micron or Nvidia and of course company like Nvidia most valuable company in the world doesn't doesn't move the needle but if you have these like small caps like GameStop it may actually move the needle quite a lot right so it's uh it's really interesting we it it you know >> did you see the AMC CEO so Adam Iran which a lot of backstory about this guy

um you know you can former CEO of Starwood Hotels Norwegian Cruise Line Veil Resorts in Philadelphia 76ers a controversial figure I think to say the least some people are not a huge fan but he he tweeted so he's currently CEO of um of AMC AMC so there was two stocks that were like really memeified. It was and AMC's always been memeified, I think, by the meme by the um even non-crypto crowd, the Reddit crowd, I'd say. >> The Wall Street Bets crowd. >> Wall Street Bets. Exactly. So, he tweeted out, "Robin Hood apparently is behind an effort related to tokenized real world assets, including stock tokens for AMC. They are not registered under US securities laws. I find this practice to be contemptable, outrageous, disgusting detestable inexcusable and

vile. How possibly can it be legal? We have no connection to this at all. We do not condone it. we immediately are going to have our outside securityities council look into this. So, it's just like I'm this guy doesn't get how the game works. He just got um >> you know, I don't know how I'm going to be able to find it, but there was a great I think the chief legal >> the the Robin Hood uh Yes. the Robin Hood general counselor or chief legal officer said, I know a thing or two about securities laws. He used to work at the SEC. >> Exactly. >> And and Vlad has been uh replying to some of I think senators or >> right here. Vlad said, "What's the concern?" Yeah. What's it concerned to?

But if you scroll up, it's it's Oh, yeah. Exactly. >> Yeah. >> Um, >> so, >> but the there's a pretty epic uh reply from the Robin Hood chief legal counsel uh to one regulator and he said, "We will not desist." Like, "We will not back down." >> Dan Dan Gallagher, I believe. >> Dan Gallagher. >> Yeah. >> So, look, Robin Hood is >> talk about an organization that is not going to step down. is going to put up a fight which by the way Coinbase has fought the SEC many many times over and won actually most if not all all of the cases. Um Paul who now works at Cognition he put up a really good fight.

Um >> Yep. >> Yeah 100% 100%. >> What's what's your read in all this stuff? Are you getting like what's the downstream effect that are you getting uh folks calling in saying, "Hey, what's going on? Uh we need research on this stuff." Like you have hedge funds interested in this. Is is it even computing? or they're paying attention. >> Um uh people are 100% paying attention. So the um I actually had many interesting calls in the last couple and meetings in New York in the last couple of days. One so one is actually been loading up on Hyperlid said that the this was uh semi-parate from this conversation but said the only reason that Hyperlid got on the radar was the preipo stuff. You remember the um preip Yeah. So that

>> Cberus Cerus and then SpaceX. They said, "Why is this everyone's sending us this platform called Hyperlquid? They didn't even know it was a place you could trade. They thought it was like a data site." And then they realized you could buy the So anyways, that was a little insight. Here's a message I got from both I'd call it the New York crowd and the DC crowd, right? The institutions and the regulators are the number one thing that matters to us right now is onchain equities. Onchain equities are the single most important thing we're trying to figure out. And uh yeah, I mean, Blockworks is sprinting pretty rapidly to release some things to help figure out what's going on with onchain equities. I mean, if you look at how these things are set up, they're essentially debt instruments. So, there's a I think, you know, if you look

at what we did with the token transparency framework and tokens, I think there's a very similar need in the market to figure out these onchain equities. They're all custody, you know, different places. They all come with different rights. Some of them come with some places are actually buying the onetoone tokens. I think Matt Leavine had a great piece on this. But yeah, I think onchain equities are are are by far the single hottest thing in crypto today. >> Yeah. >> What do you think? >> What do you No, I totally agree. I mean, this is um it's a convergence of the two most important things that are happening already combined. And so it's explosive because it draws in memes. Whether you like them or not, love them or hate them, they are the most tried. They're they are the first pro real real product market fit if you will of like just

there's there's a lot of interest in memes and then you combine that with tokenized stocks and a man a man can dream and I tend to think that these things will pave the way for NASDAQ on the blockchain and all this stuff and just the sheer volume just kind of it's like opening a massive fire hose to sorting this thing out. If the downstream implication of this is like pushing and paving the way for 24/7 365 markets, we were going to get there eventually. I think we just get faster because of what is happening now. Like who are the these authorized participants? How do they compensated?

How does this mechanism work? I don't necessarily think we need to go into this discussion in this pod but worth keeping in the back of our mind like what is the best way to tokenize a stock because there's different flavors and I think we should have maybe a discussion on on D and Asia like backpack Robin Hood >> and other folks that are doing it because I think that's going to be I don't think we figured out that model. So I think Matt Lavine summarized it nicely which is I'm going to read from this uh Matt Lavine piece from uh two days ago. He said and then there's tokenization. I sell you a token on a crypto blockchain representing AMC stock. What is a token?

We're still in the early age uh early stages of tokenization but conceptually it could be one of four things. It could be effectively stock right where AMC issues its own stock in tokenized forms. its ledger is maintained on the blockchain and someone buying an AMC stock token is just buying AMC directly on the blockchain. That doesn't really happen today, right? So that's like that is the dream but doesn't happen today. It could effective number two, it could be effectively an SPV. So I buy a thousand AMC shares, I put them in a pot and I issue exactly a thousand tokens against that pot. So each token represents an AMC share in the pot. Some people are now starting to do that.

Three, it could effectively be a swap. So I issue a thousand tokens each representing an AMC share. You buy them Santi and now I owe you the return on a thousand AMC shares right so that's the third that's the swap and it could effectively be nothing which I think in many cases is the case I issue a thousand tokens each representing one AMC share you buy them I don't actually owe you anything so when you know you see all this tokenization right Robin Hood is going around tokenizing a lot of stocks what is the what is the thing is it an underlying share held by a in the US is it held in the Cayman What is it?

Is it nothing? So I think that is the um important thing to uh look at and my take is that users do not care in the slightest when things are going well. When things are going well you users do not even think that this thing is an issue and then in you know 24 months when something happens as it always does in crypto uh it will matter a whole lot. >> Yeah. Well, it uh let's not forget when I think it was last summer, Robin Hood announced um tokenizing or Robin Hood announced access to preIPO HOD companies and there's a fierce backlash by founders of these businesses saying, "Well, I don't approve this transfer and we're going to deny

if you're an investor in these effectively SPVS." Like, good luck. we're not going to honor them. I think Anthropic, Stripe, like a lot OpenAI came out saying like we don't have no knowledge of this. We didn't approve the transfer. So, whoever you're sourcing the inventory from, good luck because we're not going to honor that. So, you it's sort of the last point that Matt was making. I I don't think it's uh you're buying a tokenized version of a stock, you don't get nothing. I don't think you get governance rights. I don't think you have like maybe you don't get the dividend TBD. Um, but let's not forget, I mean, there's if you if you're in an SPV, okay, well, you're trusting Robin Hood, you're trusting the mechanism of redemption or

what have you, but you know, I don't see it as a, you know, there's a vast majority of people that like you're still taking some counterparty risk. You know what I mean? >> Like, >> the question is, do you trust Robin Hood? Do you trust their mechanism? Um, but yeah, it could it could get contentious. We still haven't seen that yet. But >> yeah, >> I wonder what that might be like. If if it's a true short squeeze, if it's a community takeover of a super small micro cap um like and that happens on chain, we should probably have, you know, you know what would be interesting for this discussion like the Robin Hood folks, Armani from Backpack and like Rob Leer from Superstate. Like that would be a banger panel to like talk about this stuff.

>> Fast Asia, baby. >> There we go. >> Fast Asia. We got it. We got We got it teed up. plug. Soft soft plug. >> A hard plug if you're going to team me up like that. [laughter] >> Um, >> all right. You know what else was interesting this week? >> What? What? >> Oh, is there anything? Well, okay. Tell me about tell me about FOMO. What are you doing in FOMO? >> Well, you know me. Like people are calling me a plumber and uncle and what have you, but >> you know, >> Santi's like, I'm really rich, guys. >> No, no.

Once a DJ >> Sante loads up his FOMO account with just to be top of the leaderboard. He's not actually going to trade people. He just wants people to see. >> I just [laughter] listen. You know how to be number one in the leaderboard? Just deposit large sums of money. Don't trade because there's obviously the stats of >> Oh my god. >> The stats. That's not me by the way, ladies and gentlemen. The stats um are, you know, like you would expect. Most traders are not making money. There's some interesting stats circling around. we can pull them up now or or share in the show notes which we don't have a good track record of doing but uh basically like 90% of people don't win like don't don't make money it's uh only a handful make some right you have you have data

>> I don't look I don't have the data but we have you know I remember working with one of the big brokerages and we would have to say 82% of their users in the disclosures 82% of their users lose money >> so I I don't think it's just FOMO by the way I think maybe it's FOMO like Hyperlid what percentage of Hyperlid take out hype users who sit on hype because they make a lot of them have made a lot of money from sitting on hype. But what percentage of hyperlquid traders who are trading >> Binance, Coinbase, by the way, pull up Bloomberg, CNBC, and you're going to see uh Interactive Brokers um commercial at one point.

>> Look at the fine print. It says exactly what you said, consistent. Most users are not making money on these products. And it's a disclaimer that they make. It's it's important to put it in perspective because I think a lot of people say, "Oh, this is this is bad. This is really really bad." I'm like, "Well, no, it's not. It's just the nature of markets. Like it's uh it's not evenly distributed. It is sort of a power law." You look at venture, right? You know, the 1% of venture capitalists make like 90% of the returns. It's a power law distribution. Uh there's a really good stat about that. And then the the other 4% make some. Everyone else loses money. So, it's um >> y >> it's the the last thing I'll say two things. Do we have to talk about Hunter Biden's coin laptop launching on base is

coin >> do we have to talk do we have to talk about it >> we don't have to talk about it other than that look it it hit 25 billion it went all the way down it's sitting at 600 million um interesting choice launching on base and I did get the only reason I bring it up is I got it caught it caught a lot of attention like I got uh more people pinging me about that than anything else over last week >> and about Hunter Biden token >> the laptop thing. I didn't buy it. No, of course not.

>> No, no, no. I'm surprised people are paying you. I I I like I think there is just a group of people on in crypto who I'm so at this point. Did you see uh Chopping Block Laura Shin show with like um Hib and stuff. They were talking about uh FOMO and there was like you know people they were getting roasted because it was like you know a bunch of boomers talk some people were like people were like oh these washed up crypto guys trying to describe what's happening on FOMO like that is how I feel when I see like Biden Hunter Biden's laptop I'm like who in their right mind is buying this thing like but there but it makes me realize there's an entire section of crypto that I'm just in like I'm so removed from at this point and like I'm going to get

>> the point I'm making is I I you want to understand crypto and this is the this is the mentality that we had at Parfy and I was like if you really want to understand what's happening in crypto you have to be in the trenches like you have to be on DeFi like you know you have to be understanding yield farming you understand how unis swap works deposit ETH and see how the impermanent loss works uh you want to see oracle design get rugged when the oracle malfunction happens and that for me it's always been you know you can use these things 90% of the ventric VC guys don't use these things and so it's like how can you go and talk about what's happening on chain if you haven't if you're not using these products if you don't you know you're not using the

stable coin so >> so you're using but you using FOMO was very interesting to me no very interesting because you have not >> you have not been excited about crypto in I would call it two years >> that's right >> and now you are downloading FOMO and so does that mean something's changing >> yeah 100% I was like look I I reserve I can change my mind whenever the I want whenever I want And I can invest in whatever I [laughter] want. And if tomorrow I decide to put all my net worth in Hunter laptop, NFA, I can do that. I can do. And I've got there are certain times where someone >> has said, "Hey, maybe this is not the wisest thing." And I said, "Politely,

off. I can do whatever the hell I want. This is why I don't run." That's >> So So two or three weeks ago, I asked you if you were starting to allocate, and you said, "I'm starting to get interested in things." And now now I can see you're very interested. I like I you know I know you well enough at this point seem very interested. You're you're back. You're engaged. You were talking to founders which we were texting about. You're talking to new founders building new things. Santi's going to throw out an angel check or two. All right. I haven't seen this in a while. So how are you >> from an investment perspective? Are you starting to buy any tokens or not yet?

>> Look, I'll say it again. I think the best way to play the cycle is go long Robin Hood. May maybe the L2s. I mean full disclosure I own both. I was an early investor in arbitum. >> But take out the take out the early investor things which you've got like unlocked like think about new new capital net new capital. >> The the exercise I always do is any day I'm not selling is a day I'm buying and I'm I constantly rewrite my portfolio from scratch. It's like if I how do I design my portfolio? I think go look at when you think about okay if the things we've talked about the best way to be long the growing tokenization stable coins is Robin Hood in my opinion it's it seems to have a lot of traction I

think it um the Robin Hood chain similar to B&B is just this phenomenon of like the you know they're earning uh the guy from Milkroad had a really good analysis But, you know, it seems like they're going to continue to get more attention and users there. It's not going to be the only chain. Uh, but, you know, I don't I don't like the L1's. Like, I don't like Ethereum. So, sorry guys. I still don't like ETH. It's a $300 billion market cap token that the fees just don't make sense. I do think we're going to continue to talk about fees and and if that's like maybe some EIP559 discussion um to restore some balance, but if I want to go long Ethereum, I buy Robin Hood and I buy Arbitrum because that L2

is supporting Robin Hood chain and they're making you know quite a bit of fees on the activity happening on Robin Hood chain. So that to me is like a very clean way to play the cycle. um you know and I still have a small fraction of you always need to have a yolo bag which is you know playing on FOMO and you know playing with these mechanisms to understand them and really understand if it's going to be real if Robin Hood is going to continue to grow um hype um it's interesting because um what's happening with potentially bringing it back to the US or bringing it to the US I don't know if you have an update there but I think we I don't I don't really bought Rob's argument is like it's capped like it feels like it's capped and like it's

like no like persps are going to continue to be massive. >> I mean hype is one of the only I own five tokens. It's hype. >> Oh really? What else do you own? >> I own right now Bitcoin Salana Hype Zcash and Morpho >> in that order. >> Uh no not in that order. Um I I think I mean h like Hype and Zcash have gone up a lot. I think Hype and Zcash were the I think Morpho is the fifth. Morpho is the lowest, >> but Morpho hasn't really moved since I bought it. Um, right. >> Hype and Zcash were probably three and four, but they've gone up a ton.

>> Um, and then I think Bitcoin is number one, and then probably Soul or Hype is number two, three. >> Yeah. What's your thesis on Soul? I mean, because I think it's it's it's not gotten that much love. People have sort of been like a like uh they they saw the activity in Robin Hood. It's like, yeah, Robin Hood's like second gear. But I do think like it's it's come like yeah >> what they have built is so in no they're so much farther ahead of any blockchain other than Ethereum like I think in other ways Ethereum is unc uncompetable with in some areas like decentralization and stuff like that but it's a lot of areas that I don't think users and builders care much about and that's why I but I think Salana has done an like I I mean I feel like block works and gets

a bunch of crap for being like biased Salana but I think we were extremely right about it. So, I'll just put that out there. Um, >> you were right on this podcast. >> Yeah, I think um I don't know. I think Salana is still like miles ahead of so many other people. Like, yeah, Robin Hood chain, by the way. I'm also very long Robin this I'm not I didn't mention the stocks. I'm also very long Robin Hood. I'm also very long Coinbase. I know I just was ragging on Coin. I'm also very long Coinbase, but um >> yeah, I think Salana is >> like literally years ahead of many other chains. It's like sure Robin Hood chain could handle like a little bit of volume over like a 3-day period, but >> there there was fe the fees really uh spike.

>> It got out of control. Out of control. And maybe look maybe like at this period in the market retail users don't care that they're getting rinsed on fees. The maybe that's the answer. But like I think Salana has Salana has such has done so much stuff to be ready for this moment that I think I think they'll I I think Salana will have a phenomenal next couple of years as well. >> Have you ever bought B&B or held it? >> Never held it? No. >> Really? Interesting. Did uh B&B did extremely well uh off the bottom and >> do you know the exchange tokens are the best performing exchange tokens are the best performing tokens in all of crypto.

If you look you look over time >> my my point there is like well other than FT but uh for other reasons but um yeah like I remember owning B&B early on and for me it was like I don't necessarily need to be right about the direction of travel. I just need to make sure that there's more travel happening and more volume. And it was >> I think when you think of it from that lens, it's probably the s more simplistic way. It's like owning Robin Hood, right? And uh it was um do you ever think Robin Hood or Coinbase would launch the their own token?

>> No comment. I think >> no comment. >> No comment. >> That means you know something that here what's interesting. The no comment means you know something and you don't want to say it which means there is some probability that they have a token is my read. >> I would I would guess I would guess they do. >> Yeah, >> I actually I I don't know anything. I would guess they do. >> What about Coinbase? I'm interested in your view there because well you didn't mention Circle but um >> by the way Circle is another one. I think Circle is going to do incredibly well. Circle is one of people hate Circle. Do you know the network effects of like USDC? I have so I have a couple friends now building new DeFi protocols. There is every other uh stable coin is

entirely worthless to them. The integrations even with Tether USDC is the only thing that moves the needle for them. >> Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. >> Having a million stable coins doesn't make sense. Like look at Okay. Stripe bought bridge, right? Stripe, Stripe brought bridge. Bridge bridge lets everyone launch their own stable coin. What did Stripe just launch? The open standard. The open standard is a OSD. It is one stable coin. That is a validation in my opinion that the many stable coin view has failed. Why? Why does Phantom need their own stable coin? Phantom doesn't need their own stable coin.

>> What do you think? >> No, I like I agree. I I I think we will see a proliferation of stable coins, but that doesn't mean they're going to get real volume. We were talking about a lot in this podcast like what does that mean for stable coin issuers? I think it's a igopoly, monopoly igopoly like Tether's market share hasn't really moved much. USC's share hasn't really moved much. >> Where they are distributed, I think is probably the cleanest signal for you to understand if there's going to be some displacement. Like what you just mentioned, right? Um, Tron losing market share to Binance to me is a read of we're entering a bull market. Like more retail accounts on Binance, more stable coins are held typically typically a bullish indicator that people are looking to, you know, come on chain and

bid stuff. Yeah. >> Yeah. 100%. By the way, we have a we finally we are a late mover in this, but we finally have really amazing stable coin data. Um, and uh, this is, so people can just go to our website. It's all free. Just go to analytics and then stable coins. This is the uh, look at the chart. This is the chart that I was showing that I was talking about before. Look at this is Tron. Look at BNB about to pass them. Pretty unbelievable. >> What's What's right? I mean, what am I saying? It makes sense. Like I don't really I hadn't paid attention to this, but >> this is just number of number of stable coin number of people in the world who hold their stable coin based on the blockchain that it's on.

So Tether Tether on Tron, Tether on BNB, and then actually the green. Look at this one. Remember Cello. >> This is the Tether on Cello. >> Then it goes Tether on base. And then, no, excuse me. Then it goes Tether on Ethereum, and then it goes USDC on base, USDC on Salana, USDC on Ethereum, and then um and then there's a big drop off. >> Wow. Um, yeah. What else, man? I mean, we covered B and we cut. Uh, >> I am late. I got a final round interview, so I got to cut this short.

>> Final round interview. Where are you interviewing? >> We're hiring sellers, baby. We're hiring sellers. Seller. Sellers. That is >> Yeah, that is it. >> Okay. Well, two minute. We We have content of the week. One second. >> Go ahead. >> What do you got? >> You start. >> Uh, I am reading uh the fastest tortoise. uh one of the guys that partnered with Richard Greenwater, famous uh uh dealmaker from the Bass uh um family office and then he started natural gas partners. >> Bass really >> uh yeah, it's called the fastest tortoise. Um really good book. >> Nice. Um, I just read the blog post by um, Dwaresh, the um, uh, the the rise and fall of agent civilizations, which is

>> I don't know how I feel about it yet. I feel like it's either like it's like either extremely it's both very hyperbolic and like the world is but also really cool to read and also an interesting story. So, um, I'm not I I literally just finished it before jumping on. So, not entirely sure how I feel about it, but yeah, I'd recommend going to read that. a lot of whistleblowers from Anthropic, you know, calling calling the, you know, civilization >> that I disagree with. That guy's been there for six weeks and he's a junior employee. So, >> disagree. Agree. All right, man. Go to your interview. Good luck. >> See you, folks.